The reality TV visual tics and sound effects employed by Lifetime's six-part docuseries obscured the vital message of its survivor-led oral history, says Sonia Saraiya. Surviving R. Kelly "is a genre piece," she says. "Not science fiction or fantasy—it is difficult not to believe every painful word of this miniseries—but a uniquely televisual genre: the unscripted exposé. The story of R. Kelly and his alleged victims has been given the Lifetime treatment: shaky stock footage, melodramatic audio accompaniment, that suspense-heightening gimmick that transforms a provocative image into a haunting negative. Heavy-handed incidental music burbles and buzzes over every wrenching interview of dream hampton’s docuseries, through the words." Saraiya adds: "The Lifetime treatment is not the right genre for this story, with its catastrophic destruction and sprawling cast. The sound cues of unscripted television, with their irresolute, seedy flourishes, should have no place here, against this scale of human frailty and psychological devastation. Surviving R. Kelly is telling a complex story, but its tabloid sheen obscures its own profundity—and that salacious skin never lets up, through all six hours of the series. Horrifying as their content is, episodes even tend to repeat themselves, based on the assumption that the viewer can’t be bothered to pay more careful attention to what’s happening on-screen."
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TOPICS: Surviving R. Kelly, Brie Miranda Bryant, dream hampton, R. Kelly, Documentaries, Reality TV